CATALOGUE NOTEPainted in 1929, the present work is a masterpiece of Surrealism and arguably one ofthe finest Surrealist portraits. Reaching deeply into the psychology of portraiture, itdisplays many of the most important elements that were key to Dalí's rich visualvocabulary. It unites two of the movement's pivotal figures –Salvador Dalí and PaulEluard –and reflects the untamed imagination and technical virtuosity of Dalí's firstmature Surrealist paintings. Dalí and the French Surrealist poet Eluard met in 1929,around the time when the artist was staying in Paris where he assisted Luis Buñuel withthe filming of Un Chien Andalou. During his stay in the capital, Dalí came in contact withthe Surrealists and invited them to visit him in Cadaqués in the summer. Among thosewho spent the summer with Dalí were Paul Eluard with his wife Gala and their daughterCécile, as well as Buñuel and René Magritte with his wife. This visit would soon proveto be a major turning point for the young painter, and was to change both his privateand artistic life.Robert Descharnes wrote: 'Dalí felt flattered that Paul Eluard should have come to seehim. With André Breton and Louis Aragon, Eluard was one of the leading lights of theSurrealist movement. As for Gala, she was a revelation –the revelation Dalí had beenwaiting for, indeed expecting. She was the personification of the woman in hischildhood dreams to whom he had given the mythical name Galuchka' (R. Descharnes,op. cit., 1994, pp. 148-149). During the summer, Dalí and Gala took long walks alongthe cliffs near Cadaqués; Dalí fell madly in love with Gala, who would become hislegendary, life-long companion and muse. At the end of her stay, 'Dalí saw Gala off atthe station in Figueras, where she took a train to Paris. Then he retired to his studio andresumed his ascetic life, completing the Portrait of Paul Eluard which the writer hadbeen sitting for' (ibid., p. 153).Besides these momentous events in Dalí's personal life, this period also brought a levelof artistic recognition and financial success. The dealer Camille Goemans approachedhim with the proposition of buying three paintings of Dalí's own choice, as well asstaging an exhibition of his work at his Paris gallery. In November-December of 1929,Dalí's first exhibition was held at Galerie Goemans, where the present work wasincluded alongside other masterpieces from this period. Accompanied by a catalogueprefaced by André Breton, the exhibition was a great success and, as Simon Wilsonpointed out, 'it marked the beginning of his public success and shot him into the frontranks of the Surrealist group at a difficult moment in the movement's history. MauriceNadeau, the group's first historian later wrote "Yet new forces would replace the oldones. In the evening of this epoch rose the star of Salvador Dalí, whose personality andactivity were to cause the entire movement to take a new step"' (S. Wilson in SalvadorDalí (exhibition catalogue), op. cit., 1980, p. 15).Depicted with minutely executed details, the iconography of the present work combinesall the major motifs of Dalí's early –and the most innovative –stage of Surrealism. WhilstEluard formally sat for this portrait during his stay on the Spanish coast, the imagerythat surrounds him is a complex web of Freudian symbols reflecting Dalí's ownpersonal universe. Writing about the present work, Ian Gibson observed: 'It isimpossible to resist the temptation to look for allusions to Gala. Perhaps relevant is thefact that the locust has lost its arms and legs and that the former are pushing upthrough the fingers of the delicate female hand on Eluard's forehead, which presumablyare crushing the dreaded insect along with the moth. Might the suggestion be that Dalísenses that Gala could help to allay his sexual fears? One notes, also, the two handsclasping each other, affectionately it would seem, at the bottom of the portrait, linked bya mane of flowing tresses to the rocks of Cape Creus. Beside them a mop of hairsuggests a maidenhead. An allusion, perhaps, to Dalí's seaside walks with Gala, totheir growing intimacy, to his hopes for sexual potency and liberation' (I. Gibson, op.cit., p. 227).Beside the bust of Eluard, who looms large over a desolate landscape and looksdirectly at the viewer, is another head, coupled with a grasshopper or praying mantis.The animal had a highly personal reference for Dalí, who had a youthful fantasy ofbeing a 'grasshopper child', while the praying mantis was a favourite symbol for theSurrealists due to their ritual of the male being devoured by the female immediatelyafter the sexual act. Eluard himself kept a large collection of praying mantises, and Dalíwas able to observe their behaviour.The sleeping head, which here appears to be metamorphosing into a toothed fish, hasoften been interpreted as the portrait of the artist himself. It features as the mainprotagonist of Dalí's masterpiece Le Grand masturbateur (fig. 1), as well as in severalother paintings of 1929 (figs. 2 &4), and ultimately in Persistance de la mémoire of 1931(fig. 5), as part of a complex assemblage with underlying themes of desire and erotictension. The head is always depicted with its eyes closed; as Dalí wrote in The VisibleWoman, 'sleeping is a form of dying': the sleeping head, coupled with the prayingmantis, becomes another symbol of the indestructible bond between love and death.The most explicit appearance of this head as a self-portrait is perhaps in L'Enigme dudésir (fig. 4), where the rest of the amorphic body is filled with the inscriptions 'ma mere'('my mother'), a direct reference to the Oedipal complex.The head of a lion, a Freudian symbol of passion and violence, also appears in severalpaintings of 1929. Here it is seen in the upper right of the composition, confronted by ajug in the shape of a woman's face, a common Freudian symbol of woman as areceptacle. This confrontation of the male and female symbols has been interpreted asthe artist's neurotic apprehension of his relationship with Gala. Furthermore, the imageof a detached arm with fingers is in several places superimposed over the figure ofEluard. These fragmented body parts can be seen as phallic symbols, alluding toFreud's castration complex. In the distance behind the apparition of Eluard, minutefigures of a man and a child possibly refer to Dalí's fear of the impending break with hisfather. This rich and complex symbolic imagery, along with its technical mastery and itsimportance as a document of this pivotal moment in the history of the Surrealistmovement, set this painting apart as a true masterpiece of Modern art.According to Robert and Nicolas Descharnes, the present work remained in thepersonal collection of Salvador and Gala Dalí for many decades. After Gala's death in1982, the work was given to Gala's and Eluard's daughter, Cécile Eluard.